Lost in Scream Street? Cornered by Witchfinder? Frozen In Time?

Is it possible you’re just reading TOO MUCH?

Try the Trapped By Monsters Quiz and find out…

Q1. You’re plunging through Jimmy Coates: Target, gasping and driving your fingernails into the shiny cover in your excitement, when your mum calls from downstairs, telling you tea is ready. Do you:

a. Ignore her?

b. Bellow ‘In a MINUTE! In a MINUTE!’?

c. Wonder why your mother is downstairs cooking your tea when you’re a 32-year-old IT professional with your own flat?

Q2. You’ve made the mistake of reading Sam Enthoven’s Crawlers all day and then following it with Barry Hutchison’s Invisible Fiends: Mr Mumbles until 1am. You’re now staring at a black dot on your gloomy ceiling, rigid with fear that it’s a Crawler or the wizened finger of Mr Mumbles poking through the plaster. Do you:

a. Switch the lamp on and feverishly start reading On The Road With Mavis & Marge, hoping that Niamh Sharkey’s cheery drawings will chase away the panic… and then get scared of hooves?

b. Scream loudly until someone switches on the light and sponges the black dot away?

c. Empty your bookcase of all its scary novels… and then smash it repeatedly against the ceiling until you have crushed the Crawler/Mr Mumble’s finger?

Q3. At school, you’re meant to be doing maths but are discovered surreptitiously reading Dragon Orb: Aurora under your desk. Do you:

a. Explain that this is additional study as dragon flying and inter-dimensional velocity all have a basis in applied mathematics?

b. Screech like a banshee as the book is wrestled out of your hands and then stab your attackers with a sharpened 2B pencil?

c. Sigh, order the class to get on with Page 38 of Joy Of Maths until break time and resume Chapter 17?

Q4. On a long family drive you’re deeply ensconced in Dark Summer when you start to feel a bit car sick. Do you:

a. Try to pause in your reading for a while but find that you simply can’t because Eddie’s just got trapped in a pothole with rising water!?

b. Never take your eyes off the page; you are quite capable of vomiting into a paper bag and reading at the same time?

c. Decide that on balance, you should probably not read while driving, switch to the audio version of Dark Summer (brilliantly read by Tom Lawrence, available on www.audible.co.uk) bump back off the central reservation and drive on with both eyes on the road and family members no longer distractingly screaming ‘WE’RE GOING TO DIEEEEEE’ in your ear?

Q5.  You’re two thirds of the way through Hero.com when some joker tells you the ending. Do you:

a. Lose the will to go on and never read again?

b. Bludgeon the joker into unconsciousness with Villian.net (the more appropriate of the twin books as a weapon)?  

c.  Snap. Strip down to a pair of baggy underpants and run around the neighbourhood in a curly blue wig, brandishing a loudhailer and screaming out the endings of every decent book you’ve ever read so the world at large will finally understand your pain.

RESULTS

MOSTLY As.

Your responses seem perfectly normal; if anything you’re probably not reading enough.

MOSTLY Bs.

Your responses seem a little off kilter. Stabbing people with pencils or bludgeoning them with Villian.net will never work. 2B is really too soft for lasting damage and Villian.net, being a paperback, won’t carry as much clout as, say, The Goblet of Fire in hardback (with which you can knock a mule unconscious… just by reading it aloud). Re-assess your weaponry and then get back to reading. Perhaps a bit more..?

MOSTLY Cs.

You seem to have a entirely appropriate approach to reading. Audiobooks are also good and a wise alternative to wiping out your family on the M4. Why not read and listen simultaneously next time, and get your 12-year-old to drive..?

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